Gabriel Barcia-Colombo
Recorded at the Stony Island Arts Bank during the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo joins Bad at Sports from a rain-soaked tailgate outside the Stony Island Arts Bank, in the middle of Chicago Architecture Biennial programming and an open-hours weekend that turns the city into both subject and stage. A media artist whose work consistently centers human presence inside technological systems, Barcia-Colombo is in Chicago to present Media Stream, a large-scale public artwork that brings the people of Chicago directly onto the architecture they move through every day.

The project is built from hundreds of filmed participants, composited into an algorithmic, ever-changing flow across vertical LED blades embedded in a public building. Contributors are asked to perform ordinary gestures, then to imagine moments of sublimity or loss, producing intimate, vulnerable expressions that are scaled up and encountered by strangers passing through the space. The result is a work that reverses the usual logic of media spectacle, shifting attention away from screens and systems and back toward the faces of people themselves.

From there, the conversation opens into a wide-ranging discussion of digital memory, data after death, and the uneasy permanence of media archives. Barcia-Colombo reflects on early works like Animalia, Chordata, his long-running interest in collecting and containing human presence, and later projects such as The Hereafter Institute, which staged personalized funerals for participants' digital lives. Throughout, the group wrestles with the problem of preservation in media art, from CRT monitors and film projectors to contemporary AI tools that threaten to erase labor, context, and material specificity.

The episode also touches on Barcia-Colombo's collaboration with David Byrne, his role as co-director of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the contradictions of teaching technology as a humanist practice inside systems driven by speed, spectacle, and capitalization. What emerges is a thoughtful meditation on how artists can still create moments of connection and care inside infrastructures not designed for either.

Recorded live, mid-storm, with rain hitting the merch cart and conversation drifting easily between theory, jokes, and deeply personal reflection.

Highlights & Moments

• Turning public architecture into a living portrait of the city
• LED "blades" as broken, moving images rather than seamless spectacle
• Directing strangers to perform the everyday and the sublime
• Data, memory, and what happens to our digital lives after death
• Early video art as prophecy rather than nostalgia
• The problem of preserving media art as technologies disappear
• Labor, erasure, and value in digital and AI-assisted work
• Teaching technology as a humanist practice at NYU ITP
• Collaborating with David Byrne under extreme time constraints
• AI as mirror, therapist, and deeply unsettling collaborator

Names Dropped

• Stony Island Arts Bank — https://rebuild-foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank/
• Chicago Architecture Biennial — https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org
• Media Stream - https://150mediastream.com/
• Gabriel Barcia-Colombo - https://www.gabebc.com/
• Times Square public art installations
• Animalia, Chordata
• The Hereafter Institute
• Nam June Paik — https://www.paikstudios.com
• Bruce Nauman — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bruce-nauman-1478
• Paul Pfeiffer — https://www.moma.org/artists/4595
• Christian Marclay — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/christian-marclay-732
• NYU Tisch School of the Arts — https://tisch.nyu.edu
• Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) — https://itp.nyu.edu
• Neon Museum, Las Vegas — https://www.neonmuseum.org